The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

I get your point, and I definitely agree that many of the people who espouse one or another theory have an incomplete grasp of the science behind what they are discussing. Moreover, one needs read only a short time on this site, or attend to a single evening's news programs to realize that the application of even rudimentary logic is far from universal.

That we should defer to scientific experts sounds sensible if you say it fast, especially if you think of science as a job, a scientist as a trained professional, and think of expertise as some discrete power or ability. Your statement is true when science is a field defined by academic degrees, grants, and funding. However, that definition flies in the face of thousands of years of non-experts gathering data, conducting experiments to test hypotheses, analyzing data, and drawing conclusions. Sometimes these non-experts were ordinary Joe Sixpacks, and sometimes Sir Joe of Sixpack, and sometimes Brother Sixpack.

There is no clear line between a botanist and a gardener or farmer, as it were. Nor is there any reason to assume that ordinary observations of a variety of phenomena throughout one's life are less capable of leading to verifiable knowledge than the focused study in a limited field that defines one as an expert. Gregor Mendel's original field of expertise was Christianity, and as such one might assume him to be ruled by a superstitious mind, yet he employed careful investigation practices and rigorous logic to build the foundations of modern genetic theory.

Because science is about the natural world, to which all people have access throughout our lives, there is no special access code available to define someone as an expert. Obviously there is crackpot science, but that is because it is based on sloppy or ill-conceived methodologies, inaccurate data, or fallacious analysis, not because a non-expert does it.

Why do you think people publish their methods and data when publishing their conclusions? The whole point is for ANYONE to look at the methods and data, and analyze them to see if they actually make sense, to determine whether the methods are valid and conclusions are sound. There is no reason to believe that only an expert can repeat the investigation according to the published methods to see if the results are the same, or check the reasoning to determine if the conclusions actually follow reasonably from the data.

There is a big difference between citing and then analyzing previously collected evidence, and merely assuming unquestioned conclusions (based on that data) are sound.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with bowing to pragmatism, and accepting a popular theory, or even an unpopular theory, without validating it. Action often requires trust, and selection of assumptions on which to build.

However, decision-makers being pressed for time has nothing to do with whether appeal to an expert is logically fallacious.

 

And claims which you cannot defend.

 

I dispute this

A scientist is someone who has studied the field and the published peer reviewed papers.

 

Which includes the global warming realists.

 

Suuuuuure it does

Name some.

 

McIntyre and McKittrick as a start. The fact that you are not familiar with any of them is telling. Closed minds are a tragic thing.

 

Oh!! I know of them but have they had a significant impact on the science? Have they been disputed? Have their results been verified independently?

And this is only 2 people out of how many authors of the IPCC??

Oh! And McIntyre is NOT a scientist - he is a mining engineer

https://www.desmogblog.com/steve-mcintyre

 

Those are the guys that proved the hockey stick was dishonest junk science. McIntyre is an engineer (and McKitrick is an economist btw). He understands science and statistics just as well as any scientist. He destroyed the dishonest work of MBH who were all scientists. So the designation scientist is pretty much meaningless isn't it ??

There are hundreds more - it shouldn't take you long to figure out who some of them are. If your mind is open and you have curiosity and initiative it won't take long. But I'm not holding my breath.

 

Oh gosh, Dr. Richard Lindzen and Dr. Judith Curry and Dr. Tim Ball just for openers.

 

You know what floored me about the Hockey stick when I saw it the first time?

It is a graph that is constructed with the outcome in mind of the person creating the graph.

Such tiny measures of temperature laid upon a very long time span. They wanted you to believe in AGW.

Things can be "proven" with statistics too. We see they try this over things done by Obama all the time.

But temperatures so infinitesimal over such long spans of time, designed as BS.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_controversy
.

 

Sure, sometimes. But publishing is not a step in the scientific method.

In keeping with my original point, none of this in any way implies that whatever the scientist says is automatically correct, in a paper or otherwise, peer reviewed or otherwise.

 

There is a reason it was dropped from the recent IPCC AR5 and it ain't cause it was so awesome.

 

And the hockey stick was accepted as gospel by the IPCC because it got rid of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age which the politicians who write the AR's had been trying to do for decades. Thousands of papers had been written showing that the MWP was warmer than today and the LIA existed all at constant CO2 concentration but the IPCC threw out all of that and put the hockey stick on their logo (it's gone now). The other part of that is that the tree rings used to "prove" the hockey stick actually show temperature declining starting in ~ 1950.

 

Over 2000 papers show that it was globally warmer 1000 years ago in the Medieval Warm Period followed by a Little Ice Age which the planet is recovering from today. All of this took place at constant atmospheric CO2 concentration.

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For example MBH98 and MBH99. Peer reviewed and published but dishonest junk science absolutely embraced by the politicians who write the Assessment Reports at the IPCC.

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Who wrote the wikipedia article ??

 

I found one paper making that claim.

The claim I responded to was that the hockey stick was trashed, which is just false.

It comes with references unlike your claims. But arguments by arm waving are always amusing. Keep up the good work.

 

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